This blanket was woven around 1880, at the time when commercial wool yarns colored with synthetic dyes were first becoming available to the Navajos. It combines these yarns with handspun wool yarn, in both natural white and colored blue and pale yellow with plant dyes. The blanket was woven on a vertical loom similar to the one shown in this exhibit
currently at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. The exhibit was first displayed as part of the Smithsonian's component of the World Columbian Exposition, an early World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893.